Fringes Of Nonfiction 2021

Gary Taylor’s  Death of an English Major  is an intense and powerful short read. Given the length of the essay (about two and a half pages) Taylor does a remarkable job of driving the piece while leaving us with more than enough to chew on. Obviously, part of this is the weighty nature of the subject matter but Taylor also uses very direct and sometimes emotionally charged prose to begin to grapple with the murder of Maura Binkley. Taylor doesn’t waste any time in the piece, he writes, “But Maura Binkley, who died early this month in a Tallahassee yoga studio, was the target of premeditated political violence. The white, straight American male who is accused of killing her went to that yoga studio intending to kill women.” With sentences like these, Taylor both closes the door on any sort of argument as to what has occurred and leaves us reeling with connotations that extend beyond the page. We know that Maura Binkley was killed, but what does it mean to classify “senseless ma...

 In his essay, "Monster", Van Meter utilizes a heavy sense of immersion with strong descriptors and vivid imagery of his haunted “graveyards” each year for Halloween to bring the reader in to the scene and feel as if they are right there with him. His rather poetic descriptions of the houses and items he uses for his graveyards are grandiose, for example: “so it appeared that whatever supernatural force had wrested this coffin from the ground of our landscaped front yard had done so without disturbing the soil, to resurrect a creature in a child’s tiny coffin with an old man’s face.” Lines like this one are powerful and make the scene of a childhood home on Halloween feel more fantastical and almost other-worldly. I really enjoyed the way this essay was set up, with a story of a child growing up as seen through yearly Halloween scenes, that slowly builds up an underlying meaning of it all with the story really being about masks and how we use them to hide our true selves from...

Kolbert uses language and tone to strengthen her piece, it is a heavy topic and one that needs to be written about. (Similar to Hollars’s bird book) She isn’t the first person to write about an extinct animals, “Meanwhile, naturalists with similar experiences were weighing in with similarly mournful titles: Requiem for Nature, Silence of the Songbirds, The Last Rhinos, Planet Without Apes.” Kolbert has to find ways to stand out from the others and to bring more attention to hers so that people start listening, “it was only after the dolphin was gone for good” we shouldn’t wait until after the animal is wiped out to make a difference but how does one writer convince people to read their piece when there are many written about similar topics? When are people going to listen and start making a difference? We read pieces about the losses we are facing, yet nothing seems to matter. When is enough, enough? While reading this essay I was astonished at the way the author inserted many differen...

  Hi everyone!   First off, I really liked how Johnson ended his essay.   Last week, we discussed memoirs, and one of the specific questions we discussed was about relevance.   Specifically, the question of “who cares?”   While that’s a very complicated question, I think that Johnson’s turn at the end of the piece is one possible way to answer it.   I think that Johnson makes the audience care by connecting his personal experiences to a wider conversation, specifically to the issue of gun control.   Secondly, I really like how the essay progresses! The essay opens with hunting, a form of violence that many people generally find permissible, but eventually escalates, until the audience is unsettled by the casual nature of the violence in the piece.   And then Johnson takes that violence, and equates it to power and control.   I think it was a really effective way for Johnson to force his audience to think deeply on gun ownership in the U...